Cooling Raspberry Pi 4 with 52pi Power Board

The news is out! Raspberry Pi 4 runs hot! The internet is filled with thermal images of board glowing yellow and red and 3rd party manufacturers are in the race to provide the best custom cooling solution for your money. What if you would like to get something more than just a fan blowing over the CPU? You could take a look at 52pi Power Board.

Docker Pi Power Board – not just cooling

52pi Power Board in action

52pi offers a series of cross-compatible hats that you can put on your Raspberry Pi devices. I got my hands on the on a couple of them, so in each video, I will see what the boards are made of:

Buy 52pi Power Board HAT

Awful start

Before I will jump any further, I’m sad to say that the 12 V DC jack never worked properly. I took the board to Teeside Hackspace where Tom (big thanks for looking at it) first declared the TPS54527 voltage regulator dead.

TPS54527 – the new one! Shoddy job, Tom fixed it though!

I’m not too sure what killed it, but the board worked ok powered via GPIO, minus the 12V header for stacking. After 3 weeks of waiting, I received a bunch of TPS54527 and Tom yet again did a splendid job swapping the components. The board worked in the Hackspace test, but as soon as I connected it to the Raspberry Pi 4 via 12V regulated power supply with a correct polarity of the DC jack – it was dead!

Instructions don’t say anything against feeding the board from the Raspberry Pi (not at the same time), so I’m not sure what caused the problem. Since the rest of the board (fan, IR, remote, button and GPIOs) works ok, I decided to at least check cooling properties of the board.

A post shared by NotEnoughTech (@notenoughtech) on Oct 28, 2019 at 7:31am PDT

EDIT: 28 Oct 2019: 52pi reached out to me and shipped a working board. They have been kind enough also to send me 3 power regulators IC so I could attempt the repair of the other powerboard. I bumped the review score with a customer care of 5 to reflect that.

CPU cores and fancy temperature charts

NodeRED to the rescue! There is no better way to show hot Raspberry Pi 4 runs other than using a fancy dial and a chart to go with. Using the following nodes from the palette manager:

node-red-contrib-cpu
node-red-dashboard

I created a CPU Dashboard (download at the bottom) to show me the temperatures and the use of the cores. I will be testing 3 cooling scenarios:

Baseline Raspberry Pi 4 (CPU only)

Cortex-A72 – The residue is from the adhesive

Since the Raspbian update, the Raspberry Pi 4, while runs hot at idle (about 50°C) is capable of actually running at 80-82°C without thermal throttling. Pushing the Raspberry pi in excess of this temperature causes the 4 cores 1.5 GHz of the ARM Cortex-A72 to throttle, but only for a couple of seconds.

That’s a significant improvement, as the Raspberry Pi 4 is not throttling so aggressively any more.

Baseline Raspberry Pi 4 (CPU & passive mini heatsink)

It looks better than it performs!

Adding a self-adhesive mini heatsink doesn’t help much when the Raspberry Pi 4 runs at idle. It barely lowers the temperature of the CPU. The clear benefit of the increased surface shows up once the Raspberry Pi 4 nears the 80°C.

This mini heatsink was enough to keep the Raspberry Pi 4 from thermal throttling, however, did very little to actually bring the temperature down. You may get away with it if you don’t run the Raspberry Pi 4 at max clock speeds for prolonged periods of time. Running CPU in their 80°C is not advisable.

Baseline Raspberry Pi 4 (CPU & 52pi Power Board)

The real deal – 52pi 30mm fan

Finally, let’s see what active cooler can do. Comparing to some massive coolers out there, the 30mm fan of the 52pi Power Board looks puny, and it doesn’t inspire the confidence.

I was able to keep the Raspberry Pi 4 at 32-35°C at idle (room temperature 22°C) with the fan spinning quietly. There is no RPM control or dynamic ON|OFF function, but that’s fine.

Impressive. It looks like you don’t need a massive cooling tower to keep your Raspberry Pi 4 at reasonable temperature levels even at full speeds!

Pushing the CPU through the benchmark, the cores never throttled back as the temperature settled at around 50°C. That’s 30°C lower during the benchmark and about 15°C at idle.

Buy 52pi Power Board HAT

Conclusion

The 52pi Power Board would be an interesting choice if not for the issues. I usually have more luck with stuff, perhaps I got a bad unit for the review. Personally, I don’t actually need the 12V supply, and I’m sure I can find the use for the remote shutdown. If anything, the experiment with the 52pi Power Board shows, that you don’t need a fancy cooler (although they look cool) to keep your Raspberry Pi chilled.

I still have some components left, I might bother Tom again to raise the board from the dead. Until then, I will leave it to your consideration. If you think I was unlucky – this is a capable cooler. Otherwise, I’m sure you can find an alternative HAT – the improved version below. If you have any questions, let me know in this Reddit thread.

Project Download

Download project files here. Bear in mind that Patreon supporters have early access to project files and videos.

While you could wake up your PC from a mobile directly, having a dedicated server capable of doing so is the best solution. The reason is simple. You can hook up as many devices as you wish with a single endpoint. This is why Raspberry Pi is perfect for this.